Historical Memoir, Memoir

What can we do?

As the storm clouds of nuclear build up gather, we might ask ourselves “what can we do?” as ordinary citizens to prevent nuclear war. Mayor Charlie Royer asked that very question in 1980. By 1984, thousands of people across Washington state and around the country were educating themselves about the threat to nuclear war.

The mayor’s words open the twenty-six minute multimedia show, now on you tube. This show was seen by hundreds of people between 1984 and 1990 up and down the east coast and in towns around the country. It was a bulky show to put on, with its 6 slide trays, two projectors, dissolve unit, speakers, wires and amplifier.

I took my grandchildren to see the Glosnost to Goodwill show at the Washington History Museum in Tacoma. “That’s Grandpa Don’s voice!” more than one grandchild declared. He died before all of them were born. The story of this trip is about to be pubished by Epicenter Press. OpenBorders.

A new movement is slowly emerging to take citizen diplomacy to world leaders to prevent the current threat of nuclear war. Who can imagine or tolerate the administration’s plans to devise an offensive technology for North Korea’s underground defense system? Can’t we talk?

Ever optomistic about the power of a small group of people determined to change the world, I remain,

Betsy Bell

Creative Non-Fiction, Historical Memoir, Memoir

writing this memoir

Open Borders, A personal story of love, loss and anti-war activism.

Writing this memoir served two aims. Through the examination of a period of intense political activity in my life, I have been able to trace my passage to independence. Mine is the story of many women born during World War II and raised at a time when the prevailing expectation of women in America was that they’d marry, raise children, and be a supportive wife. This conflicted with the beliefs my parents had instilled in me. They’d sent me off on teenage adventures and challenged me to do anything I wanted in life. These messages fought for expression in my own development and early marriage to a man five and a half years my senior.

The second aim is political. During the 1980s a group of citizens in Seattle organized around a belief that ordinary people could influence governments to settle conflict through diplomacy rather than war. I took up one small piece of this peace-making effort and charged forward. Open Borders chronicles those efforts. Hundreds of other Seattleites and ordinary citizens across the country have stories to tell about their friendships across the Iron Curtain, all of which may have contributed to its fall in 1989. Four friends who were involved in such efforts have granted me permission to include an essay by each of them documenting how their life and work were affected by the anti-nuclear war efforts.

Writing Open Borders made me realize how proud I am of the many people who worked so hard in the 1980s to prevent nuclear war. We embraced our so-called enemies with curiosity, compassion, respect, and the firm belief that we all shared the common values of love of place and love of family. Nuclear war was not an option for us ordinary people. It would destroy all we hold dear.

Today, I am more frightened by the possibility of nuclear war than I was in 1982. I also feel alone. If there are others trembling before the “fire and fury” rhetoric and the repeating rocket and hydrogen tests, I hope this story of our activism will stir others to find ways to organize and seek peace through cross-border understandings of our common humanity and the love we each have for our homeland.

Why does it seem so few are alarmed at the threat of nuclear war today? Are we in denial or overwhelmed by the enormity of so many doomsday crises at once? Or have we, as I worry, left behind as antiquated that practice humans have engaged in for millennia of gathering in groups to work things out with minds firmly connected to hearts? Eye to eye conversations are much more effective than thumbs tapping through electronic devices. Through the latter half of the 20th century, as much as the Kremlin and the White House disagreed with how our world should be organized, one felt the leaders grasped their sober responsibility for the future of the whole world and genuinely did not want to put all that fire power to use. Today, I am not so sure. Putting words on paper is my way of taking up arms again. Action gives me hope.

Political Activist

My world first, then the inciting incident

Hello, Readers,

I’m back in class with Scott Driscoll and two of his writerly friends. The first evening’s topic was “Inciting Incident”, that event in the narrative that disturbs the protagonist’s world and from which all action ensues. My story, Evil Empire, which I referenced in my last post was now in its 4th iteration. I thought it was pretty good, about ready for publishing. I have copies out to be read by other people who were on the trip.

What slammed me against the wall was this: an inciting incident has to show up in the world of the protagonist that the reader can recognize as sudden, different and disturbing. That means that the “world” has to be described sufficiently to contrast the “new” thing that introduces the disturbance. I hadn’t done that at all in my story.

Stewing around with the problem of painting the life of Betsy Bell at the time of the trip to the Soviet Union in 1983, I came to an amazing realization. I have not owned my character in this or any of my stories. I have painted my character, my historical self, as meek, subservient, timid and deferential. Not who I was at all. ;http://patnabeats.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/who-am-i.jpg

My personal narrative has painted me in reference to the dominant people in my life, my parents, my husband, my bosses. I have failed to “see” and claim the adventurous, challenging person I have been at every step of my life.

Back to the drawing board. Dare greatly.

Here are the new opening paragraphs:

Preparing for our departure for Moscow added layers of details to my usual bustle of work as adult education director for Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle. I had articles to write for the Rubric, our monthly newsletter, classes to arrange for the youth, and adult forums on the church’s response to government war mongering. I’d arranged for a performance of 4 Minutes to Midnight. The actors skulked in white masks and skeletal costumes pantomiming the horrors of nuclear war. The show brought the reality of Seattle’s nuclear submarine base and our surrounding area getting wiped out by a nuclear bomb into my gut, eighteen inches below my head where I lived ninety percent of the time.
My husband, Aldon Bell, known as Don, had added chairing a ten day series of events called Target Seattle to his teaching and administrative duties at the University of Washington. The noon-day lectures in the Methodist Church in center city and the evening programs in Kane Hall on the University’s campus demanded so much of his time, we’d wave goodbye in the morning with a cheery “See you between the sheets!”
I knew he was working with a big committee including lawyers, doctors–members of Physicians for Social Responsibility, former Peace Corps volunteers, executives from the YMCA, teachers, citizen activists like Kay Bullitt and Ann Stadler, other faculty and people from King TV’s channel 5.

The academic year had been a blur of anti-nuclear activity and now it was spring break, March 1983, and we were off to Moscow, Tashkent, Samarkand, and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). We were traveling as tourists with the specific intent of re-affirming our strong ties with our Sister City in Uzbekistan, Tashkent. Each of the thirty-three travelers carried a packet of one hundred plus letters of peace signed by 30,000 people during the Target Seattle events. All over town suitcases were being zipped with the packets on top.

Now the reader has a picture of the life of these two people, Betsy and Don Bell. In the fifth paragraph, the inciting incident shows up.

Stay tuned.

Betsy